Book Review : Rise and Fall of a Modern Romance

The Lap of Luxury by William Hamilton (Atlantic Monthly Press; $17.95; 293 pages)

The lap in question belongs to Mary Brigham, and the lucky fellow who falls into it is Vincent Booth, an aspiring artist who meets Mary at the perfect moment for both of them.

Exported to France to forget a disastrous love affair, Mary is more vulnerable to Vincent’s considerable charm than she might have been on home ground, while Vincent, abroad on a tiny and rapidly diminishing grant, seems a more suitable husband than he would be if thrust into direct competition against young men with more impressive credentials.

If distance lends enchantment when people are apart, it’s even more powerful magic when they’re together 3,000 miles away from any interference. After her disillusioning encounter with a smarmy bogus Hungarian count, Vincent Booth seems virtually impeccable. Not only handsome, talented and well-educated, but reassuringly and wholesomely American. By the time Vincent and Mary return to New York after a deliciously romantic and increasingly lavish grand tour, Mary is pregnant and a wedding is necessarily imminent.

Congenial Sinecure

While Mary’s pompous father would clearly prefer a son-in-law who shared his enthusiasm for shooting small birds, under the circumstances he reluctantly settles for a man who would rather paint pheasants than kill them. Nobody in this diverting book is perfect, or even close.

At first Mary’s immense wealth enhances their lives, not only providing Vincent with a spacious studio but also with a congenial sinecure at a prestigious museum. Unfortunately, it also surrounds him with worldly temptations that finally become irresistible. Once back in New York, Mary’s short-lived rebellion against convention is over, and she slides easily into a routine of luncheons and committee meetings, while Vincent valiantly tries to persuade himself that he’s happy with the dead-end job his wife’s family connections have procured for him.

Following the classic tradition of comic novels, but extending it to contemporary manners and mores, “The Lap of Luxury” concerns itself not only with social and professional ambition, but with the sexual variety. When the worldly and devastatingly glamorous daughter of a famous Hollywood director takes an interest in Vincent, his fragile moral principles dissolve like sugar in espresso. Protected and insulated by his wife’s fortune, Vincent has grown older without growing wiser. His gullible innocence is no match for Laura Montgomery’s superior sophistication.

Reversed Sexual Roles

The chronicle of this hyper-modern love affair offers Hamilton a fine opportunity to assess the gains wrought by the sexual revolution, which seems to have reversed the roles of user and used. The baton of power has passed from male to female, and Vincent is punished for his indiscretion as harshly as any seduced and abandoned 19th-Century heroine. Honest, faithful and upright as long as all his needs were met by his wife’s generosity, Vincent’s character disintegrates the moment Mary discovers his extra-marital adventure and ejects him from her life. One indiscretion and the lap of luxury becomes a trampoline.

Financially desperate, Vincent attempts a spot of chicanery involving an unrecognized masterpiece; a game at which he discovers others are far more adept than he. Misfortune will be the making of him, as it has been of so many other basically decent but misguided men, but not before he has been reduced to ennobling penury. By the end of the book, Vincent is back to square one, exactly where we found him--a reasonably competent, impecunious artist far from home, starting over in midlife.

Hamilton’s targets are the interlocking worlds of philanthropy, high finance, art and academia, all of which supply him with precisely the sort of characters we see preening and congratulating themselves in his terse New Yorker cartoons. Frail and brittle as it seems, the spindly plot of this novel manages to support several times its weight in wickedly amusing social commentary, tottering only when it’s lumbered with an implausible and sentimental ending that overtaxes the construction.

Hamilton’s people shouldn’t be obliged to whip out their pocket handkerchiefs to blot up tears of joy on the last page. In the special world he’s created for them, that sort of thing just isn’t done.